No yogurt maker? No Problem!

Are you tired of the nasty, overly sweet, over priced, filled with thickeners, filled with things you can't pronounce yogurt you get at the grocery store? Do you want to cook with good yogurt that you can use to make spreadable cheese? Do you want to taste TANGY yogurt and add the fruit you want - possibly even from your own fruit? Low fat, no sugar, tasty, useful in making even better food!
Oh Oh......you say you don't HAVE a yogurt maker? NO PROBLEM!! I have just the solution for you.

this is a pint jar

Ingredients:
2 quarts milk (half gallon) of any kind of milk. Want creamy? Use whole milk. Don't want the fat? Use 2% and add some non-fat milk powder. You won't be able to tell the difference!
2 tsp LIVE CULTURE yogurt - OK, you have to start with something. From here on in, just use some from your last jar of home made yogurt. Notice how little you need!
1 Cup powdered milk (optional)
Clean jars - enough for your milk. Use either pint or quarts. Pints are nice - serving size.
Steps:
1. Warm milk to 115 deg F.
2. Stir in your powdered milk - if you're using
3. Add 2 tsp cultured yogurt, mix well
4. Pour into clean jars. Straight from the dishwasher are fine. No need to sterilize
5. Put your jars into a roaster, or pan with hot tap water up to the neck of the jars. If you have a cooler that fits them, that works great too.
6. Cover and put in a warm place to incubate for at least 8 hours. 12 is better.

Notice were is says "active culture"? This is what you want.

DO NOT DISTURB! THERE IS A LITTLE MIRACLE TAKING PLACE! Your milk is turning into yogurt! Little Lactobacillus acidophilus and Lactobacillus bulgaricus are working their hearts out for you! The yogurt with thicken when it's ready. Note: It will not be as thick as the store bought. But then it doesn't have any thickeners in it! It will get thicker once it cools in the refrigerator.

Lactobacillus species

Take it out and refrigerate. It will last about 2 weeks. I doubt it will last that long...only because you'll eat it.

I usually start my yogurt at in the evening and let it incubate all night - about 12 hours. It's ready for me in the morning! I take it to work and put it over granola.

Now....I have a yogurt maker that I love. I ordered it from Amazon.com. It's a Euro Cuisine and cost about $35.

The Euro Cuisine - LOVE it

There are many on the market, some are better than others. Like everything else....you can spend a LOT of money, but it's not necessary.
I also ordered some yogurt culture to start. Now I just save about 2 teaspoon of the last jar.

Get this, easy, cheap(er), NO packaging! Fresh! Do it with kids! A miracle of microbiology!

Keep in mind....you don't HAVE to spend any money. Try it without a maker first, see if you like the REAL thing before you spend any money.

Cavatelli, with leftover sauerbraten

It snowed a lot over night and then off and on again all day. I left for work late to give the roads a chance. It's still snowing.
Yesterday I made sauerbraten. This is basically a pot roast marinated with spices and vinegar along with vegetables including carrots, cabbage, fennel, celery, onion. This roast was a "2 fer" or "buy one get one free. So I got two roasts for about $4.50! It's been sitting in the freezer long enough!
We made a very small dent in it last night. It 's going to provide at least 3-4 meals. Tonight, first leftovers!
When I got home Wayne had found my cavatelli maker and mounted it on my new baking station. Bought this through Amazon.com about 8 months ago.

PERFECT! Time to make cavatelli!

Ingredients:
2 C flour. I have 00 semolina that I use for pasta, All Purpose flour will work fine.
1/3 C of my yogurt. (Ha, you can't get mine...MAKE SOME OF YOUR OWN...its easy!) Sour cream will be fine or a yogurt without sugar added. Check the ingredients on the container.
2 large eggs
1 tsp salt
Just enough water to make a dough

Steps: I use a food processor....but you could make this by hand....it's even more fun.
1. Combine all the dry ingredients
2. Add the yogurt, let the processor mix it well.
3. Add your eggs.
4. If you've got a nice dough now....quit...don't add any water.
5. Take the dough out, knead it a bit with flour.
6. Roll into a tube and wrap in plastic wrap.
7. Let it sit at room temp for at LEAST 30 min. This allows the gluten to develop and makes a very smooth and soft dough
7. Now cut the roll into long pieces and then roll with your hands into long rolls, about an inch in diameter.
8. IF you have a cavatelli maker, just insert between the rolls and turn the crank. The maker rolls and cuts the cavatelli. You can do this by hand but you have to cut into pieces first about 1/2 inch long and then roll and squash with a fork.

This is what mine look like.

Dust with flour and let them dry before freezing. If using them right away, drop into a pot of boiling salted water. Let them puff up a bit. Drain.
I'm going to ladle leftover gravy on them.

Using my pasta, with artichokes. Salad as the main dish

Tonight's dinner was a LOT of fun for me...the cook.
The menu: my spinach/basil pasta with artichoke hearts (and a few other things).
Spent the afternoon making pasta. Some we gave to our MOST wonderful neighbors....some we kept.
AND salad with bacon vinaigrette topped with a poached egg! (the main dish)
Start with a mix of various lettuce but add what you have. I had some green and red leaf lettuce and romaine and red cabbage and tomato and a bit of onion.
The dressing:
I used my garlic confit oil with 2 slices of bacon, sliced to about 1/4 inch. Add to the garlic confit and cook unil bacon is crispy. Take the bacon out and drain...leave the oil/fat. Now add a diced shallot or 1/4 cup red onion and saute. When limp, add 1/4 cup of red vinegar and some lemon juice and about a teaspoon of dejon mustard. Blend it all together in the pan. Turn off the heat and set aside.

Pasta:
My homemade spinach and basil pasta....see earlier posts.
Sauce:
My garlic confit and 1 tablespoon butter. Add artichoke hearts. I had frozen artichoke hearts I got from Trader Joes. Slice lengthwise....thin. Saute, add white wine...reduce. Add heavy cream....only 1/4 cup. A little bit goes a long way. Now....add your homemade pasta, not quite done.....you finish your pasta in the sauce (see earlier posts). Add pasta water as you need it. I always like to add some. It "finishes" the pasta.

Now, dress the salad with your salad with you vinaigrette dressing, top with the bacon and crouton AND a poached egg!
(HA....no pictures....we ate it as soon as I put it in the bowels.)
Plate the pasta.....eat.
Mmmmm
This was soooooo good tonight!

To top it off.....pumpkin Crème brûlée.

Totally Resistant TB

You've heard about it.....Totally Resistant TB. Time to panic? Live in the wilderness completely isolated from all other human beings? Or are you thinking, "Just another media scare. Not a big deal."

To this I say....No, No, No and....maybe. As in all things infectious and contagious, there's a long history and story behind it. There are no easy stories.

Total Resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis

 

So here's the truth:
TDR-TB: There's an early-warning list serve that we all subscribe to. It allows those of us who deal with infections a "heads up" about what's going on in the rest of the world.  It's called Pro-Med. This is not the first time we've seen TDR-TB. It's been around since 2009. At least, that's when it was discovered. There there 12 cases at that time both in Mumbai and Iran. Before that, in 2003 there were two women in Italy in 2003. Both were sick for a loooonnng time before they died....of TB infection.
You can read about their story here: briefly recounted in 2007 in the journal EuroSurveillance, published by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).
Both women were middle-aged at most (the journal says only “younger than 50″), born in Italy, from middle class families, and otherwise healthy, with no diseases that would put them at greater risk of TB infection. (Among other things, that means no HIV.) They were both treated at the E. Morelli Hospital, a giant TB sanatorium in the town of Sondalo, north of Milan near the Swiss border. They were both diagnosed by local doctors and treated with repeated rounds of the normal TB drugs — three rounds each — before someone recognized that something unusual was happening - Hello....the drugs were NOT working. They were separately admitted to the Morelli hospital with what the paper calls “a very severe clinical picture (extended bilateral cavities),” which means the TB infection had eaten away the tissue of their lungs, leaving empty dead zones. (If you’d like to see what that looks like, here are some pathology images, not from these women.)
The first woman actually caught "regular" multi-drug resistant TB from her mother and gave it to her 14-year-old daughter (who is not the second case in the paper — more on her below). She was treated in three different hospitals, with 17 different antibiotics, for 422 days, or 14 months — and took TB drugs for 94 months before her untreatable disease killed her.
The second woman — whether she was related to the first, or lived near her, is not made clear  — was in one other hospital before being admitted to the TB specialty institution in Sondalo. Her inpatient treatment took 625 days and also involved 17 different drugs. After she was discharged, she was on a drug regimen for 60 months before untreatable TB killed her also.

There are some lessons to pick out from these stories.

The first is that TDR-TB has occurred randomly before - FROM POOR MANAGEMENT OF THE DISEASE. Note, both these women died in 2003, but at that point, one had been under treatment for 5 years and the other for 8 years.

The second is that, as the Indian account emphasized that these TDR cases are artifacts, created by poorly chosen and insufficient drug treatment. The EuroSurveillance paper says that the drug susceptibility tests showed resistance to new drugs was acquired over time. Case 1 was initially mismanaged, and then admitted at the reference hospital being already resistant to the majority of the available drugs. Case 2 management and adherence to the regimen prescribed was sub-optimal before admission to the reference hospital.

What's this mean?
1. Not all physicians are adequately trained to treat TB. Only qualified Infectious Disease doctors should be treating TB. While most TB can be treated effectively (if caught in time) only those with a lot of experience and knowledge should be treating these patients. (My opinion - but others agree with me)

2. This cluster of new cases in India and Iran are just the newest reported/discovered. Get this...they are all from the same hospital. There are undoubtedly are more out there. Once again, these patients were treated ineffectively. All these TB bacteria are COMPLETELY resistant to every drug known to man. Most Indian cities don’t have the facilities to identify the TDR strain, making it more likely that unrecognized cases can go on to infect others.

3. The really bad news: TB is already one of the world’s worst killers, up there with malaria and HIV/AIDS, accounting for 9.4 million cases and 1.7 million deaths in 2009, according to the World Health Organization. At the best of times and conditions, TB treatment is difficult, requiring at least 6 months of pill combinations that have unpleasant side effects and must be taken long after the patient begins to feel well. This means that many patients don't complete their antibiotic course. Meaning that the bacteria that remain are resistant to these drugs. It's simple evolution.

4. In the USA we have a wonderful Public Health System that starts at the county level, is supported by the State Health Department and subsequently the CDC. In Pierce County, we have people that observe +TB patients actually take their drugs to make sure that they don't develop resistant TB. A problem on the horizon is the threat to this system by budget cuts. First to the State Health Departments and then to the county health department, front-line, boots on the ground people that keep us safe preventing the spread of infection in the community. This is your tax dollars hard at work keeping you safe. Really, it works! We should not dismantle the Public Health System.

Write or call your state legislatures now. Don't cut the budgets of your health departments! These cuts WILL come back to bite us.

(rant for the day)

Meatballs.....JUST the thing for a busy life

When we got home tonight I started making meatballs. 3 Days ago I took a pound of hamburger out of the freezer and put it at the back of the refrigerator to slowly defrost until I could get to it. I realized - on the way home that it was still there. Sooo, while driving the 60+ min home I decided to make meatballs.

meat balls in a zip-lock bag..waiting to be used

Recipe:
Pre-heat the oven to 350 deg F.  While heating, get started on the meatballs.
1 lb of ground meat - any meat. For me this time, beef. Hamburger to be exact.
1 small onion, diced
1 shallot (I had it in the refrig and it needed to be used) minced
4-5 large mushrooms - minced
1 small red pepper - minced
elephant garlic (mine were harvested on Saturday....you can use 2-3 small cloves - dice)
bread crumbs (mine is stale sourdough that needed to be used, use what you have - toast it and crumble into small pieces)
salt, pepper, spices. I used some fennel seed from my garden and some red pepper flakes. If I used pork I'd use some chili pepper. Chicken-Turkey, use basil. Salmon (yes-salmon) I'd use dill.....but use what you'd like.
2 eggs
Mix all this up. For some reason, I can't touch red meat so I wear gloves. Normally, I like getting my hands into my food - except for meat. This started when I was pregnant with Andy. Still creeps me out.
Make meatballs about the size of pin pong balls. The mixture shrinks as it cooks. These turn out a bit bigger than bite size.
Put these balls on a baking sheet with a rim and bake for 30 min. (or so). Check it in the oven.
Mix up a tomato glaze. I used ketchup, BBQ sauce (bottom of the bottle) and some pickle juice (=spicy vinegar). Mmmmmm - smells soooo good, at about 30 min take a spoon and cover the balls with your glaze and then bake for another 10 min or so. Beef needs to get to 140 deg F. Chicken/Turkey to 160. Salmon.....actually can be eaten raw ( I know.....but it's a Northwest thing) but I cook these to 130F.

Done!

Cool, freeze and store in a zip-lock bag for when you've had a horribly long day, the boss is a bitch, you get home late, and everyone's HUNGRY.
Take them out of the freezer, pop them in a hot pan with oil, warm up. You can defrost in the microwave before....but not necessary, let the sauce warm them up. Add to pasta or rice or potato. Add a sauce of some kind. Cream, tomato, pesto.....all of it is good and definatly better than anything coming out of a window (= "fast food"). 

Of note in my garden: The garlic and chives are sprouting, It was almost 55 degrees today and there is notably more daylight.....ahhhhhhh.

Spent the day with Andy and Tammy working on their tile kitchen backsplash. We had soooo much fun figuring, planning, measuring, etc. 2 trips to Home Depot. And then a great dinner at Counter. A "make your own to order burger". Tried FRIED DILL PICKELS!!!!  OMG...I need to learn how to do this one! Waaaay too good. Good thing they're 60+ min away.

Souffle....by MISTAKE

Last night Wayne asked for some bread pudding (his favorite). We have some hamburger buns that needs to be used so I started in. Since it's only the two of us, I certainly didn't want to follow a recipe (which usually feeds at least 10-12).
Pre-heat the oven to 350F.
I picked out 2 ramekins, filled them 3/4 full with 2% milk. Poured this into a bowel. Added a 1/2 cup of my homemade yogurt, and about a 1/4 cup of cream. Added 2 whole eggs, vanilla extract (the good stuff), orange extract, orange zest, 1/4 cup of sugar. Whipped it with my handy-dandy hand operated beater (see earlier post for pic - it's an OXO) till nice and frothy, then ripped up 2 hamburger buns and let them soak for 5 min or so.
Ladled everything into my 2 ramekins and another small one (it made more than I figured - from added eggs and such. I'll put all the wet ingredients into the ramekins in the future for more accuracy. But in the meantime....I got 2 big ones and one small one).
Placed the 3 ramekins in a baking dish - don't let them touch. Boiled water and filled the baking dish so that the water was about 1/2 inch below the rims. Note: put your baking dish on the oven rack first, then add the boiling water. Easy.
Sprinkled the tops with decorating sugar. This is large grained granulated sugar - stuff I have in the pantry. It makes a crunchy top on muffins or pastry. Carefully slid the rack with baking dish into the oven. Baked about 45 min.
We were sitting in the kitchen planning our trip to Europe so I really didn't keep track of the time. All of a sudden I smelled this wonderful aroma (vanilla baking) and went, "Oh crap....hope they're not over done!".

Bread pudding...I mean...Bread souffle

I looked in, carefully took them out. This is what came out! Souffle! It's puffed up more than an inch over the rim! Ran to get my phone to take a pic before they deflated.
OMG! We split the one in front, with whipped cream while it was still warm. The yogurt gave it SUCH a wonderful tang! My yogurt is tangy, NOT sweet - I add NO sugar. It was so much better than the almost too-sweet pudding I usually get. Light, fluffy, vanilla-orangey, not sticky/heavy.
Wayne's eyes were HUGE and said, "This is the BEST bread pudding I've EVER had!" He took the small one (left side) to work today. He said if we had a restaurant and served this we'd sell out every day. People would line up for them! (what a nice thing to say!)
It was not intended but, needless to say...this is the way I'll be making bread pudding from now on.